10 Top Link Building Tools to Make Your Life Easier

Link building is not one task in itself, it is a series of events. Everyone completes these steps differently and has a variation on what tools they love to use, but I have a few particularly useful ones that I use at least once a week. I chose these tools because they are easy to use, uncomplicated, and mostly free!

Ubersuggest: This is a Google suggest scraper which harnesses the power of popular keywords into a research tool perfect for diversifying your search. It sorts the keyword add-ons alphabetically and allows you to choose what kinds of searches you are interested in (web, image, news, etc.).

Guest Post Labs Query Generator: After you have figured out some of the best keywords to search for, plug them into this handy tool and just follow the links! You simply enter your keyword and then the tool will pair up search operators to your word to create awesome query strings for you to use.

Query Strings: When you know which kind of search operators you want to use, but you aren’t quite sure which ones are best, turn to this ultimate list of 10,000 query strings(search strings in Google) to get some great suggestions. They include everything from how to snag libraries to awesome searches for guest blog posts.

Broken Link Checker: There’s a million of these on the market, but if you are looking for a simple, free checker that plugs right into Chrome, look no further. You simply click it to identify broken or redirected links on the page, without having to open a new tab or click away from the screen.

Open Site Explorer: If you’re hoping to use competitor backlinks as a link building method, Open Site is the tool for you. While you have to pay to run more than 3 reports a day, the reports are infinitely valuable. You can show internal links on a site or exclusively external sites and sort by anchor text, page authority or domain authority.

Identify Site Networks: If you find a great site, but want to make sure it’s not part of a network, check out Spy on Web. It’s a simple tool that can show sites with the same IP address so that you’re not getting stuck on a network.

Mail Tester: If you need a website’s e-mail address and your Whois search is coming up empty, you might have to try to use many iterations of standard e-mail addresses before you get the webmaster. Things like info@domain.com or contact@domain.com are common e-mail addresses on a domain. With Mail Tester you can see if the e-mail is valid before emailing all different combinations – which I imagine would save some time and effort in the end. It does take a minute to bounce the server and back, so it’s best to be patient.

Netpeak Analyzer: If you’ve found a bunch of really great prospects, but forgot to write down the domain authority of all the sites, fear not! Netpeak is a simple tool that once downloaded can scour a list of sites and report back on metrics such as domain authority, MozRank, IP and Pagerank. It can easily be copied to other spreadsheets or downloaded as a sheet of its own. To make the best use of this tool, you will need a SEOMoz pro membership login to plug in to the tool. It then can access the full API of what SEOMoz offers and deliver any stats that were created.

Timer Tab: Having trouble staying focused? Challenge yourself to work for 25 minutes on just one project with this simple and easy-to-use tab for your Internet browser. You can set any time limit and see how much time you’ve got left in the tabs area above the URL box.

URL Opener: If you enjoy multitasking, this tool is for you. You simply paste in a list of sites and the tool will open them all within your browser so you can check out each page. You can combine the query generator with this tool to perform multiple searches at once and cross check your results.

We are constantly on the lookout for more tools and tricks to use that can help to make such a daunting task a tad easier. I hope some of these tools can help you bridge the gap between the links you need and the links you have! If you are using any unique tools not included here, please comment below and tell us why you couldn’t live without them.